1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to location-based services and more specifically to automatically identifying frequently visited locations of a location-aware device. Location-aware devices may be mobile phones, portable Global Positioning System (GPS) units, and other devices capable of determining the geographic location of a user.
2. Introduction
Today, people take on more professional and personal responsibilities than ever before. This leads to some tasks not being completed due to insufficient time, poor planning or lapse in memory. Computerized personal organizers have become an increasingly popular mechanism to remind people of tasks that need to be completed. By placing upcoming or recurring tasks in a to-do list, the user can quickly review tasks for the upcoming hour, day, or week. Sometimes, the order that the tasks should be completed is also specified. For example, a person may enter a reminder into a personal organizer that milk needs to be picked up at the supermarket and that dry cleaning needs to be picked up at the dry cleaners. The person may even specify that for efficiency purposes, the dry cleaning should be picked up before the milk. These reminders may be placed in a sorted to-do list to ensure that tasks are completed in an efficient manner. Currently, computerized personal organizers are present in mobile devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), media players, email devices, and others.
One limitation of conventional computerized personal organizers is that the personal organizer does not alert the user when it would be practical, convenient, or efficient for the user to perform a specific task. For example, the user above who sets a reminder to pick up the dry cleaning would not be reminded by the personal organizer to perform the task even though the user has just driven by the dry cleaners. The user is only reminded by the personal organizer to perform the task if the user manually reviews the to-do list or sets an alert at a specified date and time that he or she needs to go pick up the dry cleaning. However, neither of these reminders provides dynamic alerts to the user based upon the current position of the user.
Another limitation of conventional computerized personal organizers is that the personal organizer does not have a convenient way of associating a physical address with a task to be performed. In the example above, a user has entered a specific task into the personal organizer such as, “Pick up dry cleaning at Sandy's Cleaners.” However, a geographic location has not been associated with the task and therefore, driving directions to the location where the task is to be performed is not readily available. A user may search for the physical address of “Sandy's Cleaners” on the Internet or other address look up service and subsequently enter the address into a navigation program of the personal organizer or a GPS navigation unit for directions to the dry cleaners. However, this procedure is rather cumbersome. Alternatively, the user may bookmark (i.e., save in memory) the names and physical addresses of the locations of commonly performed tasks and subsequently associate specified tasks with one of the bookmarked locations. However, this procedure is time consuming and requires the user to be aware of all the locations he or she frequents most often.
Thus, a solution for an improved to-do list (i.e., task manager) without the limitations of conventional techniques is desired.